Game dev update: Spent a few days in research and planning mode. Decided that the next real decision of importance is game mechanics and experience. Combat will definitely get some focus, but here's a few things I found the last few days. Dragon's Dogma 2, (and Dark Arisen 2), is pretty much dead to me. Without a detailed rant (which I'm sure I'll share at some point), I just see blue versions of the Saurians and I can't bring myself to care about grinding down HP bars instead of doing other things like getting into more dynamic combat situations. Loads more to say about snowstorms Vs alpine river valleys and more, but that's the TLDR. Azeroth Survivors is better than WoW 😂 Yep, a webGPU browser version of wave survival is better than WoW gameplay. It's just like a permanent raid fight with all the travel taken out. An incredible showcase of the best parts of WoW combat - Crit, AoE and mob survival. Modded Skyrim beats most modern RPGs. I loaded up the game and switched to third person perspective and even with the still poor combat, it plays and looks amazing. The mods make it AAA+ graphics, but with that awesome OG soundtrack and voice acting. Also added loads of new NPCs to it with AI so it's infinitely interesting to nerd out and chill in the world. Great example of what actually needed fixing Vs what you would never change about it. Overall takeaways: Combat must feel good, but if combat encounters are just a grind of HP bars, it's going to get boring. I already planned a load of different set piece and dynamic combat encounters for AoI, but I'm going to take it 10x further. I think this is what let's you really feel the buzz of pwning a game - knowing you can handle anything, even if the enemy has new ways to try fuck you up. Phantom Blade Zero is about to demonstrate this perfectly. Character stat and skill development should get a massive amount of thought and attention. E.g. legendary bracelet that increases critical hit chance. It needs to scale with the player so it's not just OP and ruins early game if you get lucky, or becomes irrelevant if your unlucky enough to land one early game but it doesn't scale. Skyrim sucked for this. Dawnbreaker was amazing in look, feel and game mechanic, but it never scaled.... You literally got to use it with relevance for a few levels or when you were OP enough to not care what weapon you used. Tied into this is how granular should the scales be? E.g. caps on stats or levels? Should something like dexterity just be lvl 1-100 or 1-1,000? Could get boring watching your stats gain tiny amounts, but also could make the game too easy if you scale too fast. Story matters, needs branches and twists with some consequences if you decided to do certain things. E.g. I plan to have a split at the very start of the game that sets you off on in a direction that heavily favours different factions. This is similar to BG3 good/evil decisions, as well as beginning to see lockouts for going with certain factions. I have 2 factions and 7 race types that fit into 5 group/guild types in different permutations for the game. I think you'll have generally all the typical trope classes you should expect, but also a handful of new styles of story to experiment with. I have a few lockouts already designed, but I'm looking at reputation and speech stats, as well as observation skills for NPCs. The only way I'm adding LLM AI to NPCs, is if I already have a universe of lore and history for them to function well enough. I've started creating one of the languages with the help of AI to get this started already. I also created some cool filters and SFX in Audacity to help add some uniqueness to sounds for the game. Think I'll get AI to create a full list of world and game sounds I can get to work on. Let's get it $BAANA $PLS